Reflections on Stress and Long Hours on Wall Street

[Jesus Malverde]

Still, the string of deaths on Wall Street appears to rise above the level of simple coincidence. Last February, Fortune ran an article titled: “Is there a suicide contagion on Wall Street?”

Studies have suggested that financial service employees are at higher risk than those in many other industries. According to the National Occupational Mortality Surveillance, individuals who work in financial services are 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide than the national average. The highest suicide rates in the United States are among doctors, dentists and veterinarians.

It is possible that the finance industry attracts more people with depression, just as it is possible that the pressure-cooker work environment overwhelms some people who have been high achievers their entire lives. It could be a tragic combination of multiple factors. Wall Street has always thrived, in part, on its eat-or-be-eaten culture. Would curbing its competitive nature cut into its success?

Most top Wall Street firms have sought to change their work policies for young investment bankers in recent years, in part to combat some of the problems and because they are increasingly in heated competition with Silicon Valley for top talent and are seeking to make themselves more attractive.

Goldman, for example, has required that analysts take Saturdays off. Credit Suisse, too, has made employees take Saturdays off, with employees instructed to avoid even email. Bank of America has instituted a policy that requires analysts to “take four days off a month” on the weekends. And JPMorgan Chase has said that one weekend a month should be protected.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/business/dealbook/reflections-on-stress-and-long-hours-on-wall-street.html

[daredtowork]

1. Perhaps this is the vicious cycle of using money to measure status/self-worth

Especially on Wall Street where those things can be variable.

Once money becomes the sole measure, people get tempted to spend all those hours in pursuit of money. They could die in a car crash at 27 having spent their entire lives "paying their dues" in the money-driven system.

IMHO this is also the result of having monolithic "global" capitals, which pits people on a very steep ladder of success.

Does anyone remember that article by Ezekiel Emanuel - Rahm Emanuel's brother - in which he claimed he wanted to die at 75 (or at least persuade the rest of the little people that they should want to die at 75...). His reason's were roughly that he might become disabled and he hadn't been selected for the Nobel prize.

Let's break that down.

1) The Emanuels seem to be living in a fishbowl in which your life doesn't count for anything once you have a disability. There's no compensating factors, no possibilities of intellectual or cultural contribution after your body becomes "disabled" somehow. Methinks that doesn't refer to Ezekiel at all: rather that's code for people "on Disability", whom Ezekiel views as useless eaters contributing to overpopulation, and who are highly unlikely to be hidden geniuses. Those people should relieve the taxpayer of their financially burdensome selves and off themselves at age 75. With messages like these, is suicide all that surprising?

2) Ah, the Nobel Prize: that's not just recognition of your genius - it means you won a sort of status struggle and popularity contest among your peers. A lot of politicking goes into that, and the Nobel Prize amounts to a credential that money will follow. Folks who didn't get the Nobel Prize didn't cut it in the status struggle: they should accept they were weeded out by offing themselves at 75. After all, if they were worth anything to society, they would have been crowned with status and money a lot earlier.

Someone really should enlighten Ezekiel about all the race and class privilege packed into his thinking.

Anyway, on a global stage, everyone is a small fish in a big pond. The US system is especially vicious about forcing people to work without a safety net. Suicide is almost demanded as the cost of failure if you set yourself in a financially-driven status-system.

Or...we could, as a society, decide to make some changes by enforcing limits to workdays and providing a universal mincome so at least the consequence of failure isn't homelessness. We could always replace at least half our cumbersome and expensive poverty bureaucracy - which mainly serves to keep poor people poor and demoralized and under surveillance - with simple and direct hiring programs. What a thought! Give unemployed people jobs instead of employing a lot of people to be patronizing to longterm unemployed people!

Well, those are my thoughts. It's late, so I apologize if they are meandering.

[lovemydog]

2. Oh no, take off one weekend per month?

What is this world coming to?

[lovemydog]

3. P.S. I think they should be required to spend one weekend a month

in the poorest sections of the country, doing community service.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

4. Wall Street moved on a long time ago, the mythology hasn't

It's just that most people wouldn't watch a movie about asexual quants.

For most people, working on Wall Street today just means an extra decade or two of having roommates and little or no social life.

[SheilaT]

5. People who have no life of any kind outside of their job

are in a very sorry place. It doesn't matter what field they work in.

Certain professions are worse than others. The legal profession, for instance. A new lawyer is expected to spend essentially all of his or her waking hours doing legal work. There is absolutely no acknowledgement that life outside of law might possibly exist.

I'm lucky in that very man years ago, in the mid 1970's, I came to understand that I was a person outside of my job. And keep in mind, I didn't have the kind of professional occupation that can totally subsume a person. I was, at the time, an airline ticket agent, but I totally identified with my job. Then, in early 1976, I became a docent at the Natural History Museum of the Smithsonian. A totally cool thing to do, I hasten to add. And what I learned sent me straight back to school. Along the way I came to understand that I was not my job. I was a person who did a particular job. I also had various interests that helped shaped me.

Too many people, in my opinion, totally identify with their job. They are what they do for a living. They are nothing outside of that. It's a real shame.

We see the outcome of that when people retire and die soon after, because they have nothing outside of the job that they do.

Me? I actually am retired. I read books. I've always been a reader. I also volunteer at the local homeless shelter. I have friends, and I do various things with them. I'm also writing science fiction, and have known to be published on occasion.

I am not my job. I am a person, who has done various jobs in my lifetime. But I'm still myself.

I just wish others were more like me in that respect.

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

6. I think it depends on whether a real personal passion intersects with that job

I think that's different than someone who has internalized their work responsibilities to a ridiculous extent or believes that someone actually notices that they're in the office at 8:30 in the morning on a Saturday and great rewards will follow.

I feel guilty keeping my girlfriend from work when I know there is a FedEx box from Taipei on her desk. Because I know there is nothing in the world she would rather be doing than seeing if the latest prototype works or not. That has been her passion in life since she lit up a loose christmas tree bulb with a battery when she was three years old.

[SheilaT]

7. Passion for the job is one thing.

But if it keeps you from having a life outside the job, that's another thing.

I liked to say that I worked to live, not that I lived to work. In short, my job paid my bills, but it was not my life.